The background description provided herein is for the purpose of generally presenting the context of the disclosure. Work of the presently named inventors, to the extent the work is described in this background section, as well as aspects of the description that may not otherwise qualify as prior art at the time of filing, are neither expressly nor impliedly admitted as prior art against the present disclosure.
A mesh network can be implemented as a wired or wireless communication network of various fixed and/or mobile devices that are commonly referred to as “nodes” of the mesh network. Each of the node devices can communicate data throughout the mesh network, such as throughout a college campus, metropolitan area, or community network. A node device can also function to route data from one node to another within the mesh network.
A wireless mesh network can include various wireless clients and devices implemented for wireless communication utilizing a data packet routing protocol. For example, the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) Standard 802.11s describes mesh networking for wireless communications over a wireless local-area-network (WLAN). A wireless mesh network can also be implemented for data communication with other networks that are communicatively linked to the mesh network, such as with another wireless network, wired network, wide-area-network (WAN), and the like.
In a wireless mesh network, communication links are formed between the various wireless clients and devices that are the nodes of the network. The data packets for wireless communications in the network can be forwarded or routed from a source node (e.g., transmitting device) to a destination node (e.g., receiving device) via intermediate node(s).
In wireless and wired mesh networks, however, node devices often have power constraints, such as those caused by the node operating on battery power (either commonly or in emergency situations) or those imposed by costs or environmental constraints. To save power, conventional node devices may enter a power-save mode. As part of conventional power-save modes, node devices temporarily reduce power and cease communications but periodically power back up to send and receive management beacons. Thus, a node wakes up at a particular time, receives management beacons from neighbor nodes, and transmits its own management beacon to these neighbors. These conventional techniques, however, often fail to save a node device much, if any, power. This is due in part to the size of the management beacons and the speed of reception and transmission of those beacons. This is exacerbated by the structure of many mesh networks, in which a node attempting to save power may have many neighbor nodes. For each neighbor node, the node attempting to save power stays awake to receive a management beacon from each neighbor node.